Plans are Plans until they are Reality

San Ramon, CA – This past weekend saw us back at our home track, Sonoma Raceway. And we were looking forward to it, since we had a good showing at CalSpeedway a few weeks earlier.

A new tune and some further upgrades to the car and we thought we are there. How wrong we were. Truth is being told when you really put the car through its paces on a racetrack. That is what testing is for. On Friday’s testing day, we saw some issues with the #53 car that we had to address.

Sorting out the car, took us all day and we only got limited track time. Finally, the last session of the day came around and we had the car ready. Only for another competitor to drop some fluids on the entry to T8 and Reto, with the luck of that day, being the first car to hit that turn before the Marshall’s even had the chance to put the warning flags out. The back stepped out and Reto was on a ride to the tire barrier. He managed to lessen the impact as much as possible, so the car only sustained cosmetical damage. We were good to race Saturday and Sunday.

Reto Baumann reviews his Round THREE performance:
“What a weekend. We were all ready for it and really looking forward to racing at our home track. Testing on Friday surely didn’t go as planned and the car didn’t look the same at the end of the day, as it looked that morning on arrival. Saturday however, we showed promising pace and were right in the mix. During Qualifying, we just couldn’t get back to that same pace though and were puzzled as to what happened between sessions. Nothing obvious was to be found and data looked ok too. Sunday was a different story all together again, with the car running reasonably well in the morning, then dropping another issue on us on the warm-up installation lap that forced us to start from the pits and retire the car after one lap. Not what we had expected and not what we had hoped for.”

Now we have to regroup again and fix the issues we found. On to the next round at Laguna Seca end of July. And that is also the good part, that we have time in between and also can go testing with the car.



About Red Panther Motorsport (RPM)
A leading California based professional racing team. RPM competes in the Hankook Tires United States Touring Car Championship (USTCC) race series. For more information please see and visit www.RedPantherMotorsport.com and also like us on our social media channels.